96% of all page views in China are to web sites hosted within China

That’s right. The Internet in China is really more like a massive intranet. Hal Roberts of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society writes that 96% of all page views in China are to web sites hosted within China. Also: “The extremely high proportion local web traffic in China may be the result of the success of the Chinese government in blocking the international sites, like Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, that are generally the biggest destination in other countries. Or it might be because Chinese people like to read content written in Chinese by other Chinese about Chinese topics run by Chinese people. It is likely some combination of the two factors. But the end result is the same. The most direct battleground in the fight over control of the Internet in China is local — it’s happening on the local Chinese services that are the source of almost all Chinese web traffic but are required to censor content by the government.” [Read more here]